Recent reviews by LivingBatteryBox

I highly recommend this game. I have played this developer's other games, Gunpoint and Heat Signature, and I have to say this one's also incredibly well-made. Like their other games, this one will have you thinking about your actions and upgrade choices, but also isn't so overly difficult as to frustrate or detract from the experience. This game was entirely reasonable with its difficulty curve in my experience.

I found myself consistently cracking a smile or laughing at the wonderfully written dialog that's present throughout the game. The worldbuilding and story of the game are an interesting take on modern fantasy that kept my suspension of disbelief throughout with a reasonably consistent internal logic and structure. The story had me genuinely interested in outcomes of events the entire time. The banter between your allies is amazing. Everything about this game is fantastic, and I can tell that a lot of thought and love went into its 6-year development time.

This game is not enjoyable to me. I respect that the aesthetics and story are well-crafted in a way that tricks you into thinking it's shoddy, but the game design is somehow more torturous than early FromSoft titles. Expect to basically get soft-locked by sheer difficulty of things unless you look up where all the secret weapons are. Almost every enemy in the game is hitscan, and don't get me started on the golems and mech things. I get that it's a literal skill issue, but I've put time enough into the game that it just got to be tiring. The worst design decision in this game is the "Divine Light" mechanic, which, akin to dark souls, is lost on death. Unlike Dark Souls, the game starts you out on the harder difficulty and almost rewards dying till you hit Power in Misery because everything does double damage until you hit that difficulty (reminder that 90% of the stuff is hitscan). The issue is that a lot of important secrets are locked behind Divine Light doors, and the way to get it back is so absurdly obscure that I googled it, saw that even the *hint* that tells you how to do it is in the last level of the game, and just promptly decided that this game wasn't my kind of game.

The gameplay is a good example of "Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master." The story and artstyle are surreal and are inspired by the 15th century artist who shares the same name as the demon in the game. Combat is challenging but fair, often forcing you to make difficult choices. Every time I have died so far I have thought "There was probably a way for me to do that better that would have made this run a success." Allies and items available to the player throughout the game add immense replay value through the fact that they have so much build diversity in what they can do.

For instance, there is one character who can heal others but cannot heal himself, in fact depending on how you heal you might actually have him take damage by healing others. There's an item in the game that causes the character to move once at random and recover between 0 to 3 health after using an ability that turn, but the character already has that, so it stacks. This can lead to situations where he is able to effectively turn the rest of the party into tanks by healing the left and right allies by 11 health every turn, but comes at the cost of making the character more unpredictable movement-wise. This is just one example of the many combinations that you can pull off with the characters and items that leads to a very enjoyable and interesting experience.

The one thing I would change about this game is the fact that you can't select both of your starting allies and their movesets. If I had to compromise between the current system of "one fully customized character and one random with an optional selection bias to make sure you have a defensive and offensive ally" and fully customizing both characters, it would at least be very helpful if it was possible to select the second character but not their moveset. That way runs still have a degree of variance at the start, but players would be more encouraged to test insane builds without needing to rely too heavily on RNG for the start of the game (You can recruit allies easily at the start of the game, but the pool is limited and also random.) Don't let this minor amount of RNG dissuade you from purchasing the game, it's more than worth the price and the mild RNG does fit the "use what you are given well" gameplay loop quite well. I'm just one of the kinds of people to min-max builds for fun and would find such a feature very useful for testing and getting unlocks. Perhaps a speedrun mode that implements picking both characters could become a thing? I don't know, but the developers are very clearly passionate about their work and care about this project. There's a massive update in the works slated to release tomorrow that adds a ton of new items and buffs a few characters that struggle at times. The fact that they care enough to keep adding to the game despite having such a criminally low number of reviews on Steam means a lot to me. It shows that the developers care about the craft. More than worth the 20$.

Devolver Digital seems to have found good talent yet again in publishing Massive Monster's "Cult of the Lamb." The game has some minor bugs on PC, some slightly more annoying ones on console according to my brother, but other than that the game runs fine and is extremely enjoyable. The artstyle for this game is absolutely adorable, almost makes you forget how messed up the game can be at times thematically speaking. Soundtrack is absolutely amazing, couldn't recommend picking up the OST more.

The actual game design and gameplay loops are enjoyable and functional. Runs (or "crusades" as the game calls them) feed well into the base-building elements of the game, and the base-building elements of the game help prepare you for your next crusade. The game's difficulty feels just right, I think the developers took time and care in crafting an experience that not only feels fair for the most part, but also has good pacing.

I will say that the game is somewhat short, as I did finish it around the 16 hour mark, but that might be in part due to the way I built my base and the specific doctrines I took for my cult, I do not know if 16 hours or so is the standard runtime for the game. The developers do plan on adding free updates and even have a roadmap section on the main menu so you can check what comes next in their plans once they release said roadmap. In it's current state, the game is still worth the price simply because of how high-quality the game is as an experience. The number of hours that it takes to complete a game does not work well as a measure for the quality of the game, it only measures the quantity. In my personal opinion, with how busy most people can be these days, I think that valuing actual quality of the gameplay instead of quantity is a more helpful measurement of how good a game is. Thus, I find this game to have extremely good value for the price and I highly recommend it. If talk of bugs or the shortness of the game has you having second thoughts, then I would at least recommend putting it on your wishlist so you can find it again really easy once some more content comes out and the few bugs that are there are patched.

The gunplay is solid and the perk trees are relatively well organised. The only downside with this game is that it is prone to crashing without mods because of the fact that it runs on the outdated diesel engine. Gameplay is somewhat comparable to Left 4 Dead in that it is a cooperative shooter that throws hordes of enemies at you with some special enemies thrown in the mix. In Payday you can bring medical supplies, ammo, trip mines, and other deployable assets to help with the heist. Balance gets a bit wonky on the harder end of the difficulties, and the meta for Death Wish and above is unfriendly towards armor builds, to say the least. Pick up the Legacy Edition, it comes with most of the DLC, which is sadly almost mandatory because of how powerful the weapons and attachments they bring are. Fortunately, the game does go on sale often enough that picking it up on the cheap is quite easy.

A great game designed for 2-6 people. Especially fun if you play with friends. Mechanics can be difficult to pick up on sometimes if you have not played the original Don't Starve (I only recieved this for free because I played DS way back in early access). Heck, some of the stuff is new even to me since I never played Reign of Giants.

Don't let the difficulty and occasional trial-and-error for new players dissuade you from trying this game. There is an 'endless' mode which allows you to respawn an infinite number of times if you have trouble. Be aware that you will lose maximum health from respawning, but this maximum health can be replenished .

Basically, go to the wiki if you have any major questions about the games mechanics. Considering that many other survival-based games (I.e Minecraft, Terraria, etc.) seem to heavily rely on wikis, I don't consider Don't Starve Together's reliance on wikis or player intuition to be a problem.

After all, the game is quite complex, and any introduction to the game would disrupt the flow of gameplay. It would also be far too much of an info dump to actually help most people, in my opinion. With a wiki, you just look up game elements or figure them out at your own pace.

In addition to everything else, this game has an active modding community with both client-side and server-side mods availible to download. A client-side mod does not change the core gameplay at all, providing useful information to the player (in a non-cheating fashion, such as character temperature) or serving as a minor utility. Server-side mods will only be active in a server that has them, unlike client-side mods. These will often change the core gameplay, but some of these are simple utilities as well that just need communication between clients and the server to function.

I hope that my review of this wonderful game was helpful and informative. Have a nice day.